Spring and All, written by William Carlos Williams and published in 1923, was a form of poetry that was entirely Williams’ own, one which strayed from the modernist use of symbol to define the American identity. Shortly after T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land was published, Williams set out on a mission to combine the romanticism of Walt Whitman’s America with the cynicism of Eliot’s new world. Spring and All serves as Williams’s great journey to embark upon the task he felt had been bestowed upon him by his peers and the poets before him. Whitman later called this work an illustration of “the poem as a field of action,”, and, this action, rooted in experimentation and opposition to the writing of modernist contemporaries, resulted in a work of shifting prose and poetry and mirrored the goals of modern visual artists at the time—collection laid the framework for a new way of thinking about the American identity (Breslin, 50). This paper seeks to identify the relationship between the work of William Carlos Williams, modern art movements, and the national identity at the time of its publication. Through a combination of research of modern art of the early 20th century and analysis of this art in relation to the prose and poetry mentioned in Williams’ book, this paper aims to establish a connection between the goals of the visual art at the time and Spring and All. Throughout the work, Williams’ prose destroys the reader’s current way of viewing the American identity in order to reconstruct it with the poems that follow, using the images of modern art movements, such as Dada, to rebuild a vision of America. This style of writing, influenced by his desire to redefine the modernist movement, his avant-garde education,
In order to analyze the literary works of William Carlos Williams in relation to the art that influenced him, one must first understand these works of art. The Dada art movement, beginning in Europe, can be put in comparison to Williams in terms of content, methods used, and goals. According to Dickran Tashijan, Dada art “erupted in Zurich in 1916 among a number of poets and painters, deserters and refugees, who were profoundly disaffected from the senseless carnage of the First World War” (Tashijan, 56). Dada art is characterized by a refusal to maintain the norm of modern art. Not unlike Cubism and Futurism, Dada art embarks on a mission to establish new meaning in the world, finding defining characteristics of identity in antagonistic forces—the focus of the movement was not about producing aesthetically pleasing pieces of art; it generated questions of society, the artist’s role, and its own purpose (Hugnet, 3). Evaluating a work of Dada art does not give one answers or tell one how to view the world; it is an exercise in perception in which one calls into question the standards they had previously conceived of the world and learns to view each object individually, without association. According to the Tate Modern Museum of Art, Dada sought to “destroy traditional values in art and create new art to replace the old” (DADA). This art movement was characteristic of the avant-garde, which seeks to question standards previously set forward in artistic movements through experimentation. When the movement spread from Europe to New York, Williams’s interaction with early American Dada artists profoundly influenced the way he viewed his own art, as will be discussed later in this paper.
One of the first Dada artists that Williams interacted with in America was Marcel Duchamp, whose painting Nude Descending a Staircase aroused criticism and laughs when it first appeared at the Amory Show (Tashijan, 56). Now regarded as a Modernist classic, it was originally rejected by the Cubists for being too Futurist. The name of this painting may create an image of soft lines and flesh toned colors in the mind of one who had not seen it. However, Duchamp’s early work shows interests beyond that of style or form (Hugnet, 6). Over a dark background, harsh angles and shadows make up the nude figure. This led the newspapers to appropriately describe it as an “explosion in a shingle factory.” Upon viewing the painting, Williams laughed with relief, as he became aware of the shift in attitude and way of viewing that the European avant-garde could offer to American artists. A further example of this new way of viewing is Duchamp’s work, Fountain, revealed in 1917. This installation featured a men’s urinal signed by an “R. Mutt,” a supposedly prominent New York plumber. The piece reflects the goals of the Dada art movement in that it takes a common item with blatant associations and presents it so that those associations cannot be applied. The signature of the plumber was meant to challenge the bourgeois conceptions of art, as Duchamp presented the piece as one which belonged in galleries with Picasso and Matisse. This reflects William’s approach to his writing—though he wrote to challenge the ideas and styles of writers before him, he knew that his work should be viewed with the same significance.
Another artist referenced throughout Williams’s work is Juan Gris, a modern artist not traditionally associated with the beginnings of the Dada movement. Juan Gris’s paintings are considered among the most influential Cubist paintings, and his focus on objects and their individual significance is mirrored in the way Williams wrote Spring and All. Williams directly references Gris’s painting, The Open Window (1921), for example, in the prose of chapter VIII:
“Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains (particularly fine) which the onlooker is not for a moment to witness as an “illusion”. One thing laps over on the other, the cloud laps over on the shutter, the bunch of grapes is part of the guitar, the mountain and sea are obviously not “the mountain and sea”, but a picture of the mountain and sea” (Williams 34).
The attention to this particular work of art is important, as it represents the core of what Williams is trying to accomplish as a poet. He lists the elements of the painting one by one in order to establish their significance as individual objects, using words to accomplish the same goal as the painter. When reading this description, one might wonder what these objects have in relation to each other. This question of relation becomes the essence of the work of artists such as Gris and Williams, who desire to destroy pre-conceived ideas of correlation and force the “onlooker” to define his or her own experience. Moreover, the idea of witnessing the scene as an “illusion” refers to the human tendency to witness a scene according to the “imaginative reality” that already existed in the mind of the onlooker (Williams, 35). Though Williams establishes the individual significance of the elements of the painting, he acknowledges the unity between them in the overlap. This section of the prose in Spring and All perhaps serves as an analogy for a reading of the work as a whole—one must acknowledge the importance of all elements of experience in order to form their own individual experience, untainted by the tradition and imagination of previous experiences.
Gris saw this overlap not just from the perspective of a visual artist, but also from that of a poet. Though he began his career as an artist inspired poetry, Gris’s wrote poetry in conjunction with the artists and writers he met later in his life in Spain. He approached his reading, illustration, translation, and eventual writing of poetry with the same idea as his painting—he felt that one must recognize and appreciate the many parts in order to understand the whole. This poetry, known as Cubist poetry, described by René de Costa as “meant to be ‘read,’ not recited for its sonority, nor contemplated for its color or volume, but examined as a whole composed of many and diverse segments of experienced and invented reality: words, objects, and forms in creative juxtaposition” (Costa 689). Though the history of Juan Gris’s poetic accomplishments is not a necessary part of analyzing the effect of visual art on a reading of Spring and All, it does give the reader some insight into the shared goals of Williams and modern artist, as well as provide context for some of Williams’s poetic influences other than American Romantic and Modern poets.
The relationship between painting, poetry and the ideas presented in Spring and All may also be evaluated through Williams’s own visual art, especially when one considers his approach to defining knowledge and human involvement with the world around them. Williams’s Self-Portrait, painted in 1914 when he was 31, may give one insight into the avant-garde poet he was to become, as well as the messages presented in the 1923 work. In Self-Portrait, Williams stares directly at the viewer, his ears protruding and his hair unkempt. Williams made no attempt to prettify himself in the painting. In chapter VIII of the work, he states “things with which he is familiar, simple things—at the same time to detach them from ordinary experience to the imagination” (Williams, 34). Something as familiar as Williams’s own reflection becomes detached from his own human experience in Self-Portrait. His eyes, for example, demand direct contact with the viewer, seeking interaction and searching for answers. The simplicity of the portrait suggests a desire to strip away the non-essentials to get to the thing itself; in this case, the thing is the man himself. In Williams’s autobiography, he states “was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it. It was myself, naked, just as it was, without a lie telling itself to make me in its own terms” (Autobiography 357). This quote from Williams may share some perspective with the reader. Williams highlights his desire to rid his art of the non-essentials in order to get to the thing itself; as mentioned earlier in the paper, this has proven to be a defining characteristic of his poetry. The eyes framed by the features of the face become objects detached from the human body—their intensity becomes a metaphor for the search for knowledge and the definite American identity Williams sought to find in his work.
Just as an understanding in modern art movements allows for an effective analysis of Spring and All, an understanding of Williams’s use of poetic and literary elements is imperative in order to draw strong connections between the two. Early 19th century literature focused on the use of symbols in order to carry themes of American identity through, but Williams rejected this style of writing, gaining inspiration from the artists and poets that have been mentioned previously. Symbolism, which builds upon pre-conceived notions and prior knowledge in order to build context and reveal themes, shared the strategy of the romantic artists that preceded the Dada artists which impacted Williams’s writing. The new method of writing that developed as a result of Williams’s desire to deviate from traditional literary devices, such as symbolism. Similar to the images created by Cubists, Williams wrote in a minimalistic, straight-forward way in which the reader could clearly envision the scene he had written about. Take, for example, one of his most famous poems from Spring and All, “The Red Wheel Barrow.” The poem reads “so much depends /upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” The simplicity of the scene set forth by the author may lead the reader to question its purpose. The purpose of the poem is synonymous with the purpose of the scene—the feeling the scene elicits in the reader gives the objects their purpose and forms the connections between the different elements of the scene. “So much depends upon” allows the reader to